Posts Categorized: Estate Planning

This year, Estate Planning Awareness Week runs from October 17th to 23rd, and one of our primary goals is to educate you on the vital importance of not only preparing an estate plan, but also keeping your plan up-to-date. While you almost surely understand the importance of creating an estate plan, you may not know that keeping your plan current is every bit as important as creating a plan, to begin with.

In fact, outside of not creating any estate plan at all, outdated estate plans are one of the most common estate planning mistakes we encounter. We’ll get called by the loved ones of someone who has become incapacitated or died with a plan that no longer works because it was not properly updated. Unfortunately, once something happens, it’s too late to adjust your plan, and the loved ones you leave behind will be stuck with the mess you’ve left, or they could end up in a costly and traumatic court process that can drag out for months or even years. READ MORE

The generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax is a federal tax on an individual’s transfer of property to a person at least two generations below the individual. Generally, GST tax applies to gifts made by an individual to grandchildren or descendants of the grandchildren. Gifts made by an individual to unrelated persons other than the individual’s spouse can also trigger GST tax. The recipients who would trigger GST tax are commonly known as “skip persons.” The GST tax is imposed whether the transfer occurs as a gift during the grandparent’s lifetime or at the grandparent’s death through inheritance by will or trust.

Congress first introduced the GST tax in the mid-1970s to close a loophole that allowed wealthy individuals to evade inheritance taxes by transferring property directly to grandchildren and skipping the grandchildren’s parents, which avoided estate taxes at the first generation. READ MORE